Read, Write, Think, Teach, Make, Speak, Publish

You Send Me a Poem, I’ll Send You a Book

The contest closed Monday, August 20, 2007. Thanks to all those who entered!

We’re so close, I can feel it.

In a couple days, this site will reach the 3,0003,500 visitors mark, which is such a lovely thought I get a little choked up. It means that people, lots of people, are still reading poetry and I am honored that many of the poems that I chose, the poems that forgotten high school teachers, unforgettable

professors, or good, lonely hours have passed into my blood…mean something to you as well.

To celebrate this auspicious occasion and on behalf of Inconnue Press, I would like to offer a free copy of 4×1, a book of poetry by Ranier Maria Rilke, Tristan Tzara, Jean-Pierre Duprey, and Habib Tengour, to anyone who sends me a poem they love and and tells me why they love it, via the comment section of this page.

I will post the poem and comment…unless the poem is not within the public domain, in which case I will post the first few lines of it and try to find a place to link to online where it is copyrighted.

For privacy reasons, don’t include your address…I will contact you for that later. And no, this is not a way to collect info for marketing (we aren’t even big enough for that to be effective).

Nina, thanks for adding me to your goodreads. have you really read all that Harry Potter, or is that some default setting to new users? either way, another web-friendly contribution to the writers world. here’s your poem, i’ll send you a book in two years. -e

Lucifer, originally published in The American Poetry Review, by Carol Muske

Two A.M. and we’re on Lucifer, arguing, drinking,
one of us a Believer. I say if that beautiful
light-named angel, once most loved to God,
fell, he must have kept falling into insight–
scattering his illumination, plummeting, coming apart
into a broken new diety, one that divides
as the woman’s face in darkness,
the man’s face in quick rip-slashes of light.
Starry dark: down and down She falls into her empty glass,
the night sky lights up with all He refuses to let go.

Here’s the why we love the poem, and in tangent, why Poets and Writers also put her on their summer issue cover:

Can analysis be worthwhile? Well, here’s my take. Muske is a big fan of the 3D’s. Death, Desire, and Domesticity. If she could, she’d be Satan’s lover in this poem and die a second death for him. Perhaps even Lucifer’s counterpart in the poem, Starry dark, does die a second type of love-requiting death to foreground the limited version we have of His first, as I’ll attempt to show. She gives us the uncut version, if you will, for Believers only. Non-Believers need not read on.

The poem’s ‘one of us a Believer’ is Muske, I believe. The non-Believers are akin to the Republicans who watch ‘Inconvenient Truth’ and still do not have sufficient evidence to act. Starry dark (hereon in Starry) is Muske’s doppelganger, a Believer who does have sufficient truth to act.

The poem ends with Starry’s reciprocal fall, and something of what Muske has called, “the imagination’s alchemizing of what we think of as ‘fact.'” The poem elides the initial argument it presents, truth v. biography (Lucifer’s), also an ongoing conversation the poet has broached in her two collections, ‘Sparrow’ and ‘Life after Death.’ These book titles point to what I consider to be the throughline of this poem as well: Falling and all its connotations. By changing the handed down narrative of the Devil’s fate, Muske presents the reader with both Lucifer’s newborn diety and his original–it’s a two-for-one. Starry and Satan are so to speak, dead and/or alive, since the latter’s old soul is spared by the former’s action anew.

It is almost as if something akin to the chaos theory of quantum physics holds to the poetics here: the outcome of Lucifer’s death is changed (the future act alters the past) by the fact of it having been witnessed. Someone–call her Starry, call her a Believer–observes Lucifer’s fall in the poem and like Democrats watching ‘Inconvenient Truth’, is “given and not given sufficient evidence” to believe in the Hellish fate of the world. She, Starry, actually takes on His, Lucifer’s, form once He has passed on, so that both outcomes can coexist–His and Hers, Hers and His–truth and biography. He is absolved after Death, and She can still live with ‘all that He refuses to let go.’ She, is the one who through her own action foregoes the original version of the truth of His fall (the damning fate of his soul) and makes up a new one with Her ‘starring’ as the lead role in His own biography. Muske takes the traditionally accepted narrative of Lucifer’s fall as a limited version of the story. His passing on, His ‘falling into insight’ as Muske says, is made possible by Starry’s choice to go on with her own reciprocal living in darkness, content to be occluded from his truth, even the original version of his death. His fall from grace (read Death) is in effect subverted by hers being transcendent and of this give-and-take/my darkness for your light type of reciprocity. There is a little bit of Hegel’s Lord/Bondsman domestic relationship going on here. And Muske has broken it wide open. Maybe, given the celestial ramifications of their souls, there’s even a four-for-one deal in the works. 4 x 1.
love, erez

I wanted to send you a poem for your Send Me A Poem, I’ll Send You A Book. My reply will not be as good as Erez’s, I fear.

Poem: The Wintered Soul Among Wisteria
Originally published in SP Quill Magazine as the Word Wizard Challenge Winner

One need not read her horoscope to know
this woman’s fate, and though wisteria
cascades sweet blooms of lavender like snow
outside her door, it’s still Siberia
pervading the dimensions of her mind,
for not one fickle thought or patch of moss
can thrive where bleakest shadows are enshrined.
No bittersweet, no dewdrops… only loss
surrounds her heart. She tries to reminisce,
but like a barren continent grown cold,
she can’t perceive one particle of bliss.
She’s clasping grief and cannot be consoled!
Wisteria’s perfume is in the breeze,
but in her soul remains a winter’s freeze.

Clearly this poem is about the death of a loved one and the grief it leaves behind for the survivor. Her struggles to continue everyday life are well documented in this piece.

Everyone feels like they’re in Siberia struggling to find their footing in a world of chaos when someone close to them dies.

‘She tries to reminisce,
but like a barren continent grown cold,
she can’t perceive one particle of bliss.’ I think everyone can relate to the previous line because your heart grows cold after such a loss. Does anyone really recover from losing a loved one? I think we just try to find a way to receive the world without those enshrined shadows and take each day as it comes.

I am sorry if this was not what you were looking for. I thought I would still give it a try.

Around the Courtyard of Dispaire
the stony benches stare
their stony glares I’m sitting there
belittling where I’m splitting hairs
I’m feeling numb, the cold befriends
my lonely bum, it all depends
it never ends its weary way it wends
around the Courtyard of Dispaire…

From the Chamber of Self-harmful Thoughts
where sparkling quartz
embedded feebly in the walls
like unburnt warts
uncharm, unharm, unpalm
this Schwarz child as he falls
unmanned unplanned defenceless
sequestration, liquidation
determination, defenestration
from the Chamber of Self-harmful Thoughts…

Outside the Bathroom of Disgust
I know I must, constrain my lust
regain her trust
refrain from thrusting, busting,
tunnelling through time’s carapace
hoary frosts upon my face
at last arriving at the Shop
of Emblazoned Theodolites
the Hut where mud encrusted
dust needs must entrust
outside the Bathroom of Disgust…

Within the Toilet of Lost Souls
uncosted re-shelved golden bowls
lie wide open but not totally free
enjoining silvercorded foetuses for tea
but never asking why in polls
or surveys nor 11-dimensioned scrolls
upon which scrawls inscribed with moving finger
whether singularities lurk or linger
within Schwarzchild’s dreadful dreary kitchens
baking suns and planets for predestined roles
within the Toilet of Lost Souls…

Down the Hallway of Tomorrow
all the tumours full of sorrow
speak the rumours, beg or borrow
Well I never, did you ever
shiver or quiver or quaver or deliver
green-hatted pipe-smoking creatures
eponymous leprechauns blameless
nameless but well-known if not despised
try this for size, unwise, her thighs
unhorsed upon my old friend Zorro
down the Hallway of Tomorrow…

Hey Nina, I too applaud the desire for poetry to be important and recognized as an art that is alive and well! Below is a poem that I wrote about another passion of mine. I hope to use my poetry to encourage people to once again have an imagination about nature and to seek out a magical connection to it. We need to teach the wonderous, fascinating joy of nature to our children..after all, how can we save what we do not first love?

The night is still young,
with your name on my tongue,
though nothing me harms,
I will die in your arms.

Love me like you
never loved before.

————————–

And why?

When you can’t have the one that you want, the dream might keep you from going under. And if your dream finally comes true, then there is nothing left to fear. That’s what this poem is about and I would like to share it with millions of dreamers.

Hello, Nina. 🙂 I’m happy to have discovered your blog. Yes, poetry is still alive but sometimes it takes people like you to help foster it. So, thank you for this thing you started. 🙂 I’m a teacher and this 2-part poem was inspired by 3 students of mine who supported me and acted as my wise counsels during a particularly difficult school year. The second poem is about their graduation and the hope of continuing friendship.

Beloved Three

I.

I feel six pairs of eyes
Lurking and gazing out
From three heedful heads
With flowing black locks

Three graceful fingers
Wagging a warning
With three tongues a-ready
To go clucking amok

Why
Being a teacher is such a challenge and, often, it’s the students who make the job worthwhile. The end of that schoolyear was bittersweet because we were all leaving: me, to work elsewhere; and them, to go on with their studies. This poem is for those three girls and all my students, my reason for teaching, who cared.

These poems are so touching and deep. They mean so much. I want to post my own but I know that can’t. They show depression and as I long to wonder the canopies of heaven, I know that my time will come one day. But for now, I must concentrate on keeping my feelings on paper and not putting them in the worthy knots of a noose.